When there's a pile of dishes in the sink, one knows the maid is on leave. At the end of day2, when there's not a single clean utensil left in the house (even the lids for covering the dishes have been used!), one can safely conclude that the maid is on leave and this is bachelor territory.

Prema was on leave yesterday and today. It took barely 24hrs for the repercussions to be felt.

•The knives, forks, pots and pans were all in the sink.
•The cabbage which had been lying in the closet since Wednesday morn (Prema would have kept it in the fridge) was now fluffy because of fungus all over it.
•The curd in the refrigerator was so horribly sour that it could have been used as an industrial cleaning agent.
•There were three days of newspapers piled all over the drawing room couch.
•Visitors to the home were greeted by a mound of used footwear at the doorstep (Prema would normally have stocked them up neatly on the shoe rack).
•All, except two buckets in the house had been stuffed with clothes for washing.
•Everybody's underwear was untraceable. (It somehow makes it to its respective shelf, when Prema is around)
•The yellow daal which had been lying in a bowl since I-don't-know-when, was now a thick white paste of fungal fluid.
•The effort to boil milk left us with a ¼ of what was originally the milk packets' content.
•Eating out was acceptable on a weekend, but its the last thing we'd ever want on a weekday. So Dilip treated us to his very own potato-tomato-onion stew. All of us hogged it up with steamed rice and scraped the cooker clean. Even then, our 5-man team effort could not make up for Prema - the One.

We were really missing our housekeeper.